


The Lonely Year

by Ias



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, God Complex, Isolation, Loneliness, Post-Apocalypse, Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-24
Updated: 2017-09-24
Packaged: 2019-01-04 18:10:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12174051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ias/pseuds/Ias
Summary: "Butthis—this horrible, lonely year—this is when Lucretia became Madam Director."





	The Lonely Year

**Author's Note:**

> “What would you have said a year ago, if I told you that you were going to write fanfic for a Dungeons and Dragons podcast in the style of Cormac McCarthy?” --Sarah, calling me out for this bullshit as is right and good
> 
> This started out as an exercise in voice and then became a parody and then became... whatever this is. Basically I listened to episode 65 around the same time as I finished reading The Road for the first time, and decided to have some fun.

When she wakes and unfolds into the cold and the grey of undiluted night on world sixty-five there is a moment of silence and isolation so terrible she can almost believe it has already happened. In that moment there is relief and an exhaustion so heady she sways serpentine and transfixed by its song. Imagining that she has failed. The bliss of it all being at an end at last. After a moment she opens her eyes and shuffles off the cocoon of blankets and accepts that her task is not yet and may never be done.  

Through the small and circular window that same light which is its own kind of darkness, a sapping of color and a blurring of lines until the edges of everything weep and bleed. Her fingers trail over the crack in Fisher’s tank as she rises. The dust which is everywhere and always but most chiefly in her mouth with the constant taste of grinding against her tongue and in between the lashes of her eyes is also in the small crack two thirds up the wall of the tank. She runs a fingernail along the fissure until the dust falls away. Inside the tank it is dark with sleep so she pulls a blanket closer around her shoulders and a cloth up over her mouth and wanders across the tilted floor of her cabin with its soft flooding of dust on the pitched lower side. Out onto the deck of the ship. Above, a night without stars and day or night all that changes is the gradient of flat darkness. A world smothered in a black velvet pall long faded to grey and the white city always in the distance. The city that seared through the thin fabric of waking into Lucretia’s thoughts and her dreams. Like an ember burning through paper. Sometimes she feels waves of heat carried on the grit winds that wash out from it during the night and the day and the colorless expanses between, beating on the raw skin above her nose and below her brow where the cloth doesn’t cover.

She blinks away the dust and the darkness behind her eyes it is brief and red-tinged with the light which will not be blocked out and she allows herself a moment to think of all that was yet to come. Then with two fingers she wipes away the wetness from the corners of her eyes which might have been from the wind, practiced to avoid rubbing the dust in deeper.

And she sets to work.

 

* * *

 

The first breath Lucretia took on the surface of the world scraped like a long and wiry rope being pulled out her mouth from the pit of her stomach. She gagged and tried to breathe in and lifted her face out of the dust that had swallowed it.

For a while she could do nothing but choke and blink and press the pads of her fingers into the corners of her eyes with gentle desperation, making it worse and unable to stop. At last her eyes were clear and sore. She looked out onto the jagged grey plain and the white sky and began to understand what had happened. Thrown from the ship in the crash, landed in the soft dark dust between the rocky outcroppings that rose like barbed waves frozen in place. After a while she got to her feet, her ankle pained but walkable. In the maze of crags and boulders which had looked so flat from above there was no sign of the rest of the crew or any other living thing in the world. Only marks in the dust like a long tail dragging behind some reptilian behemoth trudging blind and unfeeling through the primordial dust to tell her which way to go.

She came across the ship after many painful steps and paused to reach down and palpate the swollen flesh around the fibula, her tunic pulled over her mouth and nose and the wind needling her eyes. Every speck of dust was the gnawing mouth of a parasite on every inch of tender flesh. The ship lay with its deck tilted towards her, off kilter in the shadow of the escarpment which stopped its long and devastating slide. Immediately she could see the gouges and burn marks and the problems that soon would become impossible to ignore. For the time being she limped over to its sharply lowered side and pulled herself onto the deck where minutes before she had stood with her friends around her and stared down at the surface of the planet with quiet and unshakeable confidence.

She limped up to the bond engine first. Muted with dust. Missing pieces as heinous and terrible as a mangled corpse. She bit her lips beneath the cover of her tunic and forced herself to go on. To the door to belowdecks hanging ajar on one hinge. Looking for the others.

Down the narrow corridor, one hand trailing along the thin coat of grey dust on the wall where she leaned her weight. It was very quiet but for the sound of hissing metal but no crackling of flames. She was frightened, but that was very far away like the ground from a high fall. Inevitable and rushing towards her but also meaningless and out of reach for just a while longer. The first thing was to find the others. Thrown free in the crash as she had been, or unconscious somewhere in the wreck. Only a set number of possibilities and she would exhaust them all.

Her bad leg skidded on the thin coat of dust and the slope of the tilted floor. The grey dust was in her eyes and she had to blink and rub at them, rubbing the grit deeper in. A distant part of her mind noted bulges where the hull had crumpled but held. And then she stepped into a different light and the touch of air on her face, and she stepped through the place where the wall was supposed to be but instead there was nothing but a blackened gash framing a flat white sky on the opposite side of the ship. She stepped through it and a ways away with her feet sinking into the dust. When she looked back the hole in the ship was as dark as  between the stars where she had come from and seemed to go on forever into some deep place in the earth. She took a breath to call out for the people who should have been there but the silence was too thick to batter through and she knew all the same that she was alone.

When the white flash of the falling Light streaked across the dull northern sky she looked up briefly and noted its position in her journal. Not yet fully aware that the time would never come to retrieve it.

 

* * *

 

Down near the hard and sunken scar in the ground which might have once been a river is the cluster of structures which might be dwellings but which resemble nothing more than toss debris clinging to the raised slope where the wind can push it no longer. Tossed like flotsam on the edge of a grey sea. Garbage in piles mortared with dust and empty spaces. Wind whistling through it and heard clear from the opposite shore of the gulch as Lucretia trudges towards it. Her face and body bound with dirty rags. As she nears the village movement begins shuffling among the piles, grey shapes that move like pieces of refuse scuttled by an apathetic wind.

By now Lucretia knows where to go and who to talk to at the least risk and greatest chance for good salvage. There are many reasons why people are cast from the city to this place but some reasons are safer than others. She wanders through the tracks in the dust between the structures until she finds the figure with a long staff of sheared metal slumped among piles of junk. Junk which has been harvested from the vast waste piles which surround the city like a nest of its own filth. The figure does not speak or look up as Lucretia stops before it.

Flat sheet metal, she says. Her voice blunt and ugly with disuse. Screws and bolts, if you have them too.

The figure inclines its head to her like a pile of dust shifting under its own weight. Flat dull eyes of an indeterminate color stare blearily into hers. Red rimmed with dust above the tattered facemask. Wait here, the scrapper says. With a flick of fingers a shadow Lucretia had not seen springs from the refuse and goes tearing off small and flapping-clothes into the maze of old junk half-sunken in the dust. Lucretia and the scrapper say nothing until the child returns with a dirty scrap of paper. Lucretia doesn’t look at the child, doesn’t wonder what they did to end up here. She has stopped asking questions of this world, stopped turning it over in her mind like a puzzle which will finally reveal itself sane and sensical when she finds the proper angle at last or perhaps the right piece to pull free and unravel it.

The scrapper charges her two cans of food for the metal she wants. More than she can afford but there’s no choice in the matter. Lucretia goes to load it onto the cloth sling she binds around her hips and shoulders to drag the pieces along behind her through the dust.

The danger comes halfway through the half-day journey back. Humming like a struck metal plate. The feeling moving against her skin like wings. Lucretia slips free from the harness with practice and kicks dust over the metal she is hauling and then sprints for the nearest tor. The soft dust underfoot  pulls her feet down and backwards and she almost isn’t fast enough. She throws herself down into the shadows of the rock and pulls her cloak over her face just as the patrol passes by.

She lies still and breathes through the dust until the air is still and then she waits much longer. When she raises her head and climbs to her feet she can taste the grit on the inside of her teeth and it burns inside her nose. It takes her longer to find the scrap metal under the dust which has gathered on top of it and in the greying light as the day becomes the colorless blind afterimage that is the beginning of night. She keeps moving. There is nothing else to do.

When she reaches the ship she turns around and studies a smearing darkness squatted on the horizon where it gathers the strength to fling itself forward. The flat grey plains stretching out in all direction except one, where they are broken by the white beacon. Like an equal and opposite necessity the dust storm waits on the opposite rim of the world but it will not wait for long. She tightens the strip of cloth around her mouth and nose and sets to sealing the ship against the storm like a coffin against the press of earth.

It’s the dust which has saved her in the end. Fine and grey, it washed over the shattered hull of the ship within hours of the crash. Now, months later, all that remains of the ship is the promontory of its barren mast and the sagging mouth where the hull tore open. In a landscape riddled with rocks and caves, it is almost invisible to the things that are hunting her.

Often she thinks about turning herself in. Kneeling down in the dust and grey rocks as the drones hang in the air around her, lift her up  and bring her to the city at last. She composes entire arguments, even writes some of them down—why they need to trust her, help her, repair her ship and keep her alive and make certain she can leave. But she dreams of her friends, their stone faces turned to watch her, and when she wakes the silence in the ship is the same silence of the dream, a silence which spans the entire world.

Inside, she sets to plugging up the gaps and torn seams in the hull that she hasn’t found the time or means to repair yet. Grateful always for the habit of counting days, sixty five years of ingrained habit reminding her what is waiting if she can’t find a way to survive. This is day three hundred and five. The storm falls on the ship like a landslide and she crouches by Fisher’s tank to hum a harmony to his song of terror. Three hundred and five days. She has come too far to fail them now.

 

* * *

 

Days passed with little change except the fear growing like a tumor eating up more and more of her inside. She waited for the others to return; found Fisher singing quietly to the fracture in the wall of his tank. She repaired it but had no water to spare and so he spent his days floating near the bottom, his world reduced by a third. The rations on the ship would last for weeks. A length of time which seemed endless and untouchable until the end of the first week when she was still alone.

Searching the surrounding area revealed more pieces of the ship torn free by the rocks as it heaved itself over a landscape like a shark’s mouth. Lucretia gathered them into a pile without knowing what to do with them. Panels of jagged metal. Absurd puzzle pieces. Looking at them made the fear inside of her stretch tighter so she went out more and kept looking. The names of her friends rushed up against the rocky spires and rolled back to her soft and flat and useless. It was three weeks before she steps into Taako’s cabin still ransacked by the violence of the crash and her own insufficient efforts to make things right again, and pulled his spellbook out of the dust.

She had never scried before. Watched others do it in their early and failed attempts to find the Light. An endeavor quickly abandoned but useful again now. Lucretia gave herself three days to learn the spell and then decided to attempt it after two. One more day of waiting was too intolerable to contemplate.

Into a shallow bowl set on the canted table she poured a precious ration of clean water, enough to gather at the lowest end as if huddled into itself. Lucretia took a breath, scanned the pages of her notes one final time, and began.

She poured herself into the spell and the water bulged out to meet her and she fell downward into the sky, flying across the long grey plain of this world like a stone with no direction all speed and no intent but the _pull_ of the names branded in her mind. Shooting through her like arrows. Impossibly fast. The pain built and then broke and it was over.

She came back to herself with a gasp, vertigo threatening to topple her. It passed quickly enough. What mattered was that the spell was working and the water was still in the bowl. She took a breath and leaned forward again.

She saw it. The city, clean white and lush with color, grass so verdant her eyes watered. It came in stutters. Blinks between beats of her heart, holding the image so gently like trying not to think of something without thinking of it in the first place. Her view careened over red rooftops, high domes, rising over the tiered city like a bird caught in a long and sweeping gale, a glimpse of the apex and four massive stone figures kneeling in a pool of their own shadow—and it blinked out.

The surface of the water trembled like living skin and went still and clear. Impossible to know how close she got. She gripped the sides of the basin to stop her hands from trembling. Again. Again.

Father this time, the shape of the spell more solid in her mind but still like a wet glass globe, the image arcing past the four judges and the wet shudder of cold fear down her spine, past the white walls never stained with ash, out onto the grey plain that embraces her with familiarity and relief. _They could have escaped_ , but the thought and its ensuing stab of hope knocked her concentration askew and once more the image was gone.

This time her knees buckled beneath her and she slid to the floor. For a while she remembered how to breathe, not panting with exertion but rather her breaths coming in sudden hard far-apart gasps, almost expecting to see her breath fogging in jets before her. It doesn’t. The cold is only inside. After a while she gripped the table with clammy hands, wobbled the metal basin from the table though her arms could hardly support it, sloshed water on the floor and on herself but eventually brought it to the floor with enough left to try again.

The focus moved slow, panning over the grey stone like a swinging pendulum, magnetized, pulled ever so slightly closer to the focal point of the spell with every swing. Lucretia swung with it, was almost thrown loose when her grip on the spell weakened. Closer to the ground. The rocky landscape of still and silent ocean waves, jagged in the act of breaking.

There. The spell settled. A flat plain, broken by strange shapes. Statues. Lifelike, but strangely formed—standing still and upright with their hands pressed to their sides and some caught in the act of falling, running. The oldest ones are soft and rounded from the winds and the dust but it is not these that seared themselves into her mind seconds before she blacked out, awakening later in spilled water and cold vomit puddling against her cheek. It was the six figures as crisp and detailed as the day they were made, tilting and falling into a pile where they were abandoned.

Real terror came for her then. For two days it ran through her bones like an electric charge and her hands shook uncontrollably no matter what she was doing and she could not ever seem to breathe right even as she continued working on the ship as if nothing has changed. She wanted to take off onto that long plain, to run until she collapses, to scream until she can’t breathe. The pressure hanging over her head threatened to crush her skull from the inside out.

She’s been doing this for over half a century. But she’s never had to do it alone.

Days later, she sat down on the slanted floor by Fisher’s tank and pulled out her journal. Page after page of entries which grow thinner and thinner as if being starved.

Day 55. Still alive.

 

* * *

 

Impossible to know when the Hunger will arrive. As Lucretia’s magic melts the scrap metal into an airtight seal on the ship’s hull she guesses it will only be days. When she steps up to the tiller and starts the bond engine for the first time in almost a year the ship stirs beneath her like something turning in its sleep,  rising and straightening so that for the first time since waking in the dust Lucretia stands level on its deck. She puts the ship down again almost instantly. Settling in for the final wait. No relief even now because the closer she is to success the more terrible the threat of failure.

For a while she wanders through the interior of the ship, stopping in doorways and staring at the light coating of grey that hangs over everything like a pall, disturbed in places by the movement of the waking ship as if her crewmates returned to their quarters only to move a book a couple inches to the side, to scuff the dust and then disappear. After the hum of the engine the ship is flooded with silence unbroken even by the hollow gnawings of the wind held at bay by the airtight hull. A shrine or maybe a tomb. In Magnus’s room she picks up a small carving and set its down in the circle without dust it had waited on for almost a year.

In her quarters Fisher is bobbing and singing in his tank, glowing brighter than she has seen in months. She slides to the floor with her back to the tank and her knuckles pressed to the cool glass. I’m going to keep us alive, she said. I’m going to do this. I swear. I won’t let us die.

She falls asleep to the faint vibrations of Fisher’s song thrumming into her skull through the glass.

 

* * *

 

The dustfall thick as silence and up to her ankles as Lucretia slogged back to the ship. The final broken piece of the bond engine tucked in her coat and rough with grit like spilled sugar but still it would function. It would work because it had to. That was the only kind of logic available to her now.

In the end she should have known that this would be the time. So close to success. So vulnerable to failure. Still she felt mostly excitement even as she began to lose track of her way. The only thing to do was to climb the nearest promontory and scout out the area. As always it was a risk but not an unreasonable one. She did not feel even a prickle of her lizard brain as she hauled herself handhold by handhold over the crests of the stony sea.

She stepped up and looked over the rocky outcrop and saw first the glint of her ship in the distance that only she knew to look for and then she saw the patrol. He was lingering below the lip of the canyon in midair not twenty paces away. Out of sight until she had climbed. The thrumming mechanism which carried him pale and glowing like a shard of the city glowing with its bright cancerous light. And the man sitting in the open cockpit who began to turn towards her movement. She started to shrink back but it was too late. He had seen and his eyes were wide. He was the cleanest person Lucretia had seen since the crash. The dust could not or would not touch him. His chestplate caught the light of a flat and distant sun and gleamed like sterile medical equipment.

The moment snapped and he began to reach for something and Lucretia released the magic before her hand was fully raised. It barreled out of her fingertips and her palm with a force that knocked her backwards down the unforgiving tumble of rock. Time yet for the sight of that face lit up lineless as a child’s with the fire that rushed to meet it. Soft and alive. The rock met Lucretia’s back as she fell and cleaved into it like the dull horn of an animal. She hit her arms and legs but not her head until she lay in agony in the soft dust breathing into the hairs of her nose. Before all else she reached for the fragment of the engine. A dubious yet incandescent miracle to find it still within the folds of her clothing. A bruise in its vague outline already forming where it had dug into her skin. Nothing more.

She stumbled to her feet and ran hunched-over and gasping in the only direction she could. All the while the feeling as if she had left something important behind her. A desperate need to climb back up over the rise and see if the patrol was still there. She had acted on instinct alone and the power she had unleashed was unmodulated. She did not know if she had killed him. It was very possible that she had killed him.

By the time she reached the ship her pace had slowed and the pain overtaken her. Still she went straight to the bond engine and set to securing the final component. The work was long and her fingers clumsy. Her thoughts unwieldy as well. Images of that face blinking in and out of focus, darting at her like a hawk then veering away into a babbling cacophony of sound-images in a dark room. Her fingers twitched and twitched again.

She went belowdecks and into her quarters and reached for her journal without thinking. The pen slender and delicate in her fingers. She settled down onto the floor as she had thousands of times before in a dozen different world and she put the stylus to the paper and waited. Waited for the words to settle in her mind like flies. Crawling and buzzing and darting out of reach. Day 286. Still Alive.

She stared down at the words a while waiting for more to come but they did not. Inside she was dry and smooth and empty of all features. There was nothing more to say or maybe she just couldn’t say it. Nothing but a flat expanse of grey and particles of fear. When she looked down again a dark jagged lightning bolt had wormed across the page. Her hands were shaking and she realized they had not stopped shaking since the spell left them.

She had never killed before or at least never like this, and still yet that niggling possibility that he had survived and all could return to how it was. And yet she knew all the same that it did not matter. She knew she would do nothing different if and when the time came to do it again. One life weighed against this world and a million others, all laid out before her like pebbles on a stone beach stretching out into forever. And only one life standing between them in oblivion.

After a long time she closed her journal with trembling hands and set it on the floor beside her. An observer no longer. No room left to tilt the story into a different light. It was grey and she was lost and was a character on a page no longer.

 

* * *

 

Morning as flat and grey as a metal etching on the day when it arrives. Black columns descending from an obliterated sky. A sky which leered closer and struck out at the earth with dark strands like fungal probes darting into the soft grey plain to gestate. Dark figures already marching on the horizon. Searching and ever hungry. On the ship the old terror so familiar it has grown smooth with frequent use, a blunt force pounding in Lucretia’s chest as the bond engine screams to life and the ship lurches into the sky. Measuring in minutes now, seconds. So much that could end so quickly. The pillars with the texture of smoke and the ferocity of lightning surge towards the ship and the wheel is slick in her hands as she moves the ship around them on nothing more than Davenport’s notes and her own brief practices on the ground. Shudders and an awful scream as the ship clips the edge of a pillar. Waterfalls of darkness pouring down. Darkness like fingers closing around her point of light. Her shoulders scream with the effort of wrenching the wheel. All the while the ship shooting up into the sky like a meteor pulled back into space, blue-bright and racing out away from the world and the statues with her friends’ faces lying silent and forgotten in the dust.

The ship rises one last lurch and then it breaks free. The darkness all behind her now. Somewhere it is devouring the Light and with it the entire world. Lucretia does not mourn. She has seen the shape of what must be done. One day, she is going to stop this. The knowledge holds her together like a center of gravity.

As the surface of everything begins to tremble like heat Lucretia closes her eyes. Waits for the barrier and the white threads and the cut across Merle’s forehead and the bruise around Magnus’s eye. She waits for all the missing things to return and fall into the empty places they left behind. Gone for so long but surely some things could never be lost. The world unravels and knits back together and Lucretia waits.


End file.
